Archive for the ‘Creationism’ Category

Sounds ….not very biblical, does it? Or, on the other hand, a simple kind of duh-oh statement.

Yet so necessary.

I am sure you have seen some version of this: “Pray for Sister so-and-so….”

A week will go by and we will hear that God “healed” Sister so and so, who has recovered from her bout of …hay fever; say.

Wellll… it would be certainly attractive to a few of the the hyper-Calvinists among us, some of whom see God as micromanaging His creation down to the quantum level, to think this way. To others, who are secretly wondering whether God is able to live up to His majesty, they do not wish to let a moment pass in which we do not get to give Him a plug.

To others of us, we rest gently and safely in the knowledge of His creation in us of those aspects of our bodies that enable us to thrive and prosper, and (shhh….) are also secretly glad of things like Antihistamines, developed by (shssss) … men*).

Is this confusing to you?

I knew a Christian couple once who did not wish to believe the opinion of a Nephrologist — a Kidney doctor — about the condition of their loved one, because he — are you sitting down? He believed in a big bang . Somehow this disqualified him not only morally but technically to understand the science they themselves were ignorant of. I did point out to them that Chuck Colson was a big fan of the big bang.

… Some time ago I belabored to explain nuclear decay to an Assemblies of God pastor** who was in my Critical Care Unit visiting a patient. Using the decay of radioactive isotopes technicians are able to detect the location and existence of blood clots in the body — a very important diagnostic tool. He was willing to accept this; except insofar as this very technology is what also enables us to demonstrate that the world is much older than the 7-10,000 year old “young earth” viewpoint. His belief was that my “belief” was in the science rather than the scriptures; not that he understood a scriptural understanding of old earth creationism; nor for that matter even the science of nuclear decay.

Why does this matter? It matters to you, single Sister, because very many of you in the Anglosphere will be spinsters to your graves because of the lack of single men, who believe that they are being asked to do something else than walk in integrity if they accept the claims of Christ on them. Various organizations have fostered this impression; your local church may be one of them.

It matters further in that we muddy the water unnecessarily when we con-fuse (fuse-together) empirical claims with theological ones. There are times (the feeding of the multitude…actual healing miracle [both present and past]….the resurrection) when they are commingled and not con-fused. And there are times that we just confuse people, and ourselves. There is no need for a contest, any more than between husband and wife.

There are links on the blogroll to help you find your way forward in reading nature, His other book.
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*Yes, with His help, I am most certain. I have a private theory that the Simians – the Apes, Chimps, and so forth — are close to us in physiology so that we may have them to better understand our own physiology with drug testing, and so forth.

** This man wasn’t buying it. But he was able to wonder aloud, to me, if I was homosexual (I am certainly not.) This pastor did not have a paradigm for a biblically and scientifically literate single man in one; and he had a pulpit. We do have a long way to go, don’t we?

I have a coworker who is a King James Only advocate; a pastor’s wife. She believes not only that the King James Version is the only translation that one is supposed to use; she considers in fact that translations of the scriptures into other languages than English should be based on the King James Version. She is a more or less functional mother of two and a qualified Critical Care Nurse. And the light she has about this is, in fact, darkness. A lifetime in church, and as a pastor’s wife no less, has not enforced or delivered sufficient integrity into her thinking processes that she can reason her way past this kind of “tribal” thinking that is heavily imprinted onto her. She will readily quote a passage in Revelations that warns against changing the words “of this book” and re-enter into the circular logic that keeps her from noticing that the New Testament was written, in fact, in Koine Greek. It is a further irony that the last six verses in the Textus Receptus, the Greek New Testament compiled by Erasmus and used by the translators of the KJV, were in fact back-translated from the Latin into Greek because Erasmus did not have source material to use for those verses, which includes the passage which my co-worker has lodged in her brain.

So….what does this have to do with the antiquity of the earth, and why have I elevated this matter to the level of a “Credo” instead of mere commentary? Like my colleague who is stuck in her circular reasoning, in like manner many in the Evangelical world are “stuck” in a fit of circular reasoning they will never escape unless they confront the contextual clues right in the Genesis account – what the secular world would call “contradictions” – that point us towards the account being allegorical. If you are comfortable with allegory and imagery in the end of the Bible, will you not accept that, then, at the beginning?

I have made this a “Credo” because I wish to affirm that this matter is of great import, and to argue that reformation is needed in this; a reformation just as pressing and wide in scope as Luther’s reformation. Our Catholic and Orthodox brothers have more light in this matter. The world has more light in this matter. And this reformation must take place. We do not need reformation such as this man calls for. We need reformation that this man calls for. Many ernest Protestant sisters will go to their end childless and alone because of the ball being dropped by the keepers of the status quo.

Sisters: Do you grant that men and women are different? Well and good if you do. Do you grant, then, that our experience of His Lordship is different? Even better. I call on you to recognize, then, that ernest men with integrity will look at something else than the tribe’s expectations or what they feel about something when examining empirical reality. And these are the kind of men that our century calls for.

“But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world’s creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!” — Augustine: City of God 11:6 [AD 419]